The University of Chicago added its own orb to outer space recently.

The game ball from Chicago’s 1909 victory over Indiana was aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, under the care of NASA astronaut and Chicago alumnus John Grunsfeld. Grunsfeld photographed a vintage Edwin Hubble basketball with the Hubble Space Telescope visible through the portholes.

Hubble, a 1910 Chicago graduate, was a star basketball player at the school before he became a famed astronomer. Hubble and his fellow Maroons posted a score of 18-12 over Indiana in 1909.

Hubble earned his doctorate in astronomy from Chicago in 1917, and after a tour of duty in the first World War, he took a job at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where he photographed Cepheid variables through a 100-inch reflecting Hooker telescope, proving they were outside the galaxy. 

Hubble had also devised a classification system for the various galaxies he observed, sorting them by content, distance, shape and brightness. From these observations, he was able to formulate Hubble’s Law in 1929, helping astronomers determine the age of the universe, and proving that the universe was expanding.

“Broke out the b-ball today before HST release,” Grunsfeld wrote in a May 19 e-mail to Michael Turner, the Bruce and Diana Rauner Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Chicago. Grunsfeld and three of his crewmates successfully upgraded the Hubble telescope during five spacewalks.

Among Grunsfeld’s challenges on his fifth space mission was to figure out how to get the ball up there. Read about how he did it.

“It’s a cosmic mystery as to how the ball was filled, and now for me how to drain it,” Grunsfeld told Turner, who had borrowed the basketball from the athletics department for its orbital flight. Grunsfeld will return the basketball personally to the university after the mission, where it will go on display at the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center.